When building social media scheduling tools, your users may want to leverage TikTok's native editing tools, like trending audio or specific filters, before their video goes live. Post for Me supports this hybrid workflow by allowing you to push content directly into a user's TikTok account as a draft.
Here is a breakdown of how to utilize TikTok drafts and how they differ from system-level drafts.
The TikTok Draft Configuration
The TikTok Draft feature allows you to upload media to the platform without immediately publishing it to the public feed.
How it works
When creating a post, you pass the "is_draft": true flag inside the tiktok object within your platform_configurations payload. The API will process the video and send it to TikTok.
The User Experience
The end-user will receive a notification directly within their TikTok mobile app indicating a new draft is ready. They can then open the app, apply native TikTok effects, edit the caption, and manually hit publish when they are ready. This enables a seamless hand-off between your scheduling platform and native app posting.
Platform Drafts vs. System Drafts
It is critical to understand the distinction between sending a draft to TikTok and saving a draft within the Post for Me system.
How it works
These are controlled by two entirely different parameters in your API request:
TikTok Configuration (
is_draft): When set totrueunderplatform_configurations.tiktok, the Post for Me system will process the post. The media is sent to TikTok's servers, and the post status becomesprocessed, even though it is unpublished on the TikTok app.Parent Post Object (
isDraft): When set totrueat the root level of your post payload, the Post for Me system will not process the post. The post remains safely stored in your database as a draft and is never sent to TikTok (or any other connected platform).
Note: If you are using the TikTok Business connection, the is_draft functionality behaves the same way, allowing professional users to stage their content natively.